There are various limitations in using templates. For years, the template limits have been set to artificially low numbers to prevent denial of service (DoS) attacks. However, in most cases, the low limits have just hindered the development of articles, and their supporting templates, due to being perhaps 2x too small for practical use.

The articles which exceed the "wp:Expansion depth limit" have mainly involved top infoboxes which try to display multi-nested data, such as animal-name taxons (in the biological taxonomy naming system). However, there are also infoboxes which try to use Template:Convert with the default auto-rounding, which uses almost half of all expansion-depth levels due to extreme complexity in trying to estimate the precision of the result. Suggested changes are listed in the essay: "WP:Avoiding MediaWiki expansion depth limit".

For a list of all pages which exceed the expansion-depth limit, see:

• Category:Pages_where_expansion_depth_is_exceeded

It is not possible to view the whole list at once, just 200 pages at a time.

In many cases, the major infoboxes which exceed the expansion-depth limit can be modified, in complex ways, to reduce the overall expansion depth, but those rewrites often take weeks, months, or years to complete.

The ultimate solution would be to start raising the template operational limits, by perhaps 10% higher each month, to see how the higher limits can allow more functionality without causing excessive drain on system resources.

[ This essay is a quick draft to be expanded later. ]

• WP:Advanced article editing
• WP:Advanced template coding

Related categories:

• Category:Pages where expansion depth is exceeded
• Category:Pages where post-expand include size is exceeded